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“... by ex-wives, hangers-on both ex and current, by agents, publishers and magazine editors – in short, both those who have given and those who have received. There is a half-hearted attempt to elevate the proceedings by including testimony from the likes of Irving Howe and Alfred Kazin, but even they tend to get dragged down into the mire. (Who else but a ...”

“... The first thing a novelist must provide is a separate world.’ So Philip Larkin pronounced, and his two novels certainly provide one, as does his poetry. Is the same true of his friend Kingsley Amis, who hazarded the shrewd guess that Larkin published no more novels because he feared failure, in that genre, of the power to keep going with his own separate world of art? It seems likely that Amis has done something which in terms of the novel may be more difficult, and that is to carry the reader with him into whatever new places his interests or imagination have led him ...”

“... the time. Not only that, but afterwards she was under strong pressure from the film’s director, Philip Blenheim, not to reveal that she was anything more than an operator of special effects. Publicising her human contribution would spoil the magic of the film, you see, and he was bound to be against that. The echoes of ET are pretty deafening here, though ...”

“... Mary, with the husband who by the 1570s was something of an embarrassing national memory, Philip II of Spain. While Philip and Mary are depicted with perfect fairness, and in what might be considered the position of honour, they yield in size and body language to the star of the picture, Queen Elizabeth. The only ...”

“... with a brief article in Nature in 1959, when two astrophysicists at Cornell, Giuseppe Cocconi and Philip Morrison, postulated that there existed a uniquely well-suited frequency, nestled in the microwave portion of the electromagnetic spectrum, at which intelligent civilisations might seek to communicate with us. Frank Drake, an astronomer at a newly ...”

“... shows. But that is what happened in January 1997, when the New Yorker published Lorrie Moore’s short story, ‘People like that Are the Only People Here’. What was so powerful about this story? The subject-matter, in the first place, was irresistibly painful. It concerns a mother, never named, who finds a blood clot while changing her baby: ‘what is ...”

“... have the operation reversed.’ Metcalf shares a waiting room with a dentist who’s almost as short of clients as he is: ‘the waiting room was empty, except for a pair of evolved rabbits in miniature three-piece suits … Someone had to clean their bridgework, I guess, and my dentist wasn’t doing so well he could afford to turn away their ...”

“... you look at this wonderful, sumptuous catalogue and feel simultaneously replete – and curiously short-changed. Where, for example, is the colour work glimpsed in the book put together by Trudy Wilner Stack, 1964, the year Winogrand was on a roll, driving through the States on a Guggenheim Fellowship and making brilliant image after brilliant image? Wasn’t ...”

“... the tortured relationship between Australia and its English-speaking relations: one of his first short stories, ‘American Dreams’, is about a small Australian town and its dreams of ‘big smooth cars’, huge refrigerators, ‘women like Kim Novak and men like Rock Hudson’. The eight-year-old protagonist of His Illegal Self is called Che Selkirk, so ...”

“... earlier stomachers, but now backs and arms were also uncovered. Waists became very high – or ‘short’, in what was then the common term. Indeed, the busts of these dresses could measure as little as one and a half inches above the waist. With the loss of hoops, the fine muslin would cling to the body, accentuating the stomach and thighs. And the material ...”

“... individuals.’ Carlyle’s principles were more influential than his practice. Although his short memoir of his friend John Sterling is counted as a minor classic of biography, his much more elaborate life of Cromwell, not to say his interminable History of Frederick the Great, has never been shortlisted among the world’s greatest examples of the ...”

“... with television’s ‘grammar’, with its conventions and how they might be broken. As a short-story writer I was attracted by its scale, its intimacy. The possibilities and limitations presented by the 30, 50 or even 75-minute television play seemed very close in some ways to those presented by the ...”

“... Only a few months after the first, revelatory, biography of Philip Larkin there come two new lives – whether they are ‘revelatory’ will need pondering – of Michel Foucault. It is a suggestive coincidence. The one an exemplar of humanism, the other a grand exponent of anti-humanism, they are about the best in the way of writers their two countries have lately produced, and at their death they seemed to leave as great a hole ...”

“... Suffering pain, writer’s block, and the rage of critics, Philip Roth’s hero Zuckerman resolves to quit writing fiction and go to medical school. ‘Who quarrels with an obstetrician?’ he reasons: He catches what comes out and everybody loves him. When the baby appears they don’t start shouting: ‘You call that a baby!’ No, whatever he hands them, they take it home ...”

“... who in a single month, June 1789, discovered not only the papers of the theatrical entrepreneur Philip Henslowe, on which most of our knowledge of the working practices of the Elizabethan theatre is based, but the records of Sir Henry Herbert, Master of the Revels from 1622 to 1642, a complementary treasure-trove on Jacobean and Caroline court ...”